Happy 70th Anniversary Ericsson Canada!

This year represents Ericsson Canada’s 70th anniversary. Our history is deeply connected to the history of telecom in Canada. For the past seven decades, we’ve been helping to connect Canadians, providing critical telecommunication services in the big cities and rural areas.

In 1953, Ericsson came to Canada, specifically Montreal, under Ericsson Telephone Sales of Canada Ltd.

In the following decades, we worked hard to innovate and develop Canadian telecom.

In our early days, we helped connect Canadians by installing underwater power cables between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. In 1984, we worked with Rogers Cantel Inc. to deliver a national mobile telephone network for AMPS-system. In 1986, we installed Canada's largest hands-free intercom system at the Federal Government’s International Development Agency in Hull, Quebec.

We also delivered the world’s largest private radio system in 1991 to Sasktel, Ericsson Digital Access Communications System (EDACS), which would eventually become the standard in Canada. In 2005, Ericsson introduced Automatic Device Configuration to the Rogers Wireless network, making Rogers one of the first operators worldwide to implement this solution.

Ericsson Canada grew throughout the years, as did our offices and research and development centers. We opened our first R&D site in Montreal in 1986. We brought our expertise in innovation to Ottawa after the Nortel acquisition in 2009, which included their RAN R&D centre in Kanata. Over the years, we’ve invested billions of dollars into our Canadian ecosystem, ranking 14th in?Canada’s Top 100 Corporate R&D Spenders ?list in 2022.

In 1997, we helped to establish Canada’s first academic program in wireless communications at the University of Waterloo. Since then, we have established relationships with more than 20 post-secondary academic institutions, important government research agencies and technology ecosystems with our partners.

Seventy years have passed in the blink of an eye for Ericsson Canada. In 1953 Ericsson Canada was just one small office in Montreal, but today we are a team of 3,100 employees with state-of-the-art R&D facilities in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa.

We’ve come a long way, and I can’t wait to see where the future will take us.

Today, to commemorate this milestone, we launched an anniversary webpage with a historical timeline, video, news and a message. Check out our anniversary website and learn more about our history below:

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